Friends and Lovers (31 page)

The nebula chap looked as if he were indeed in a fog, and the science don was no doubt trying to explain the rules of sconcing to him, judging by his increasing bewilderment. The Permanent Undersecretary looked pleased for the first time this evening. (“At least they haven’t changed in some things,” he was saying to himself. ) The Middle East man was the least noticing of the three, being too interested in his story of the Italian baroness in Constantinople. (His explorations were of a diversified nature. ) The tide of Oxford reality slipped over David’s table. Halsey—who had carried on a continuous stream of conversation from Delius to Ravel, from Ravel to ravishing Garbo, somehow from there (unless under the barn under the boo under the bamboo-tree was as good a place to be alone as anywhere) to T. S. Eliot, and then in one easy bound to Kant and the Categorical Imperative, which brought him right into the problem of his tailor’s bill (the man had actually forgotten half a dozen ties which had been bought six months ago)— suddenly halted. He stared with distrust and then dislike at the sweet set before him. It was a strawberry jelly frozen to almost glacial hardness.

“Anemic liver,” he said, picked it up in his hand, weighed it as if it were a cricket ball, and then lobbed it down the table.

It was well caught, and thrown onward, and managed to pass three tables before its final disintegration. The German nebulist leaned forward with increasing interest. It was all becoming clear: the medieval tradition of the lords seated on the dais, with the tumblers and clowns amusing the henchmen down in the Hall. The unconscious tradition . it was all becoming perfectly clear. He began speaking at incredible speed in German to the science don, who had been unfortunate enough to admit that he spoke that language, and who smiled and nodded when he felt the meaning was beyond his vocabulary—just to keep the old boy happy. He certainly did: there was a nice little footnote of five and a half pages to be added to the dissertation on The Medieval Mind and Its Attack on the Possibilities of Space, now in preparation.

An unreal world, David thought. It had become so natural to all of them that, when they left it, they might find the world outside quite unreal in its reality. He thought of the small flat which he and Penny would have, forming their own world of two rooms and kitchen in some place like Netting Hill. He compared it with all this—the high, vaulted hall, carved and shadowed; the stone fireplace, which would be bigger than their kitchen; the rows of gleaming silver, the hurrying servants; the distinguished guests feeling their prominence at High Table, while the undergraduates ignored them completely and the dons wished the Permanent Undersecretary would finish his savoury and let them retire into the Senior Common Room for dessert and port and—at last—a cigarette, or a cigar, with a snifter of brandy. (The junior Fellow, who must serve round the fruit in the Senior Common Room, was looking at his wrist-watch covertly, wondering if he would get away in time to take his wife to that picture which he had promised her. She would be sitting over in his study in College now, after dining at home on scrambled eggs and a baked apple. If only she would eat a decent meal by herself on the four nights a week he had to put in an appearance at High Table, but women were strange. She said a decent dinner was made to be shared: made her feel more alone. If this old blow-hard didn’t finish up that savoury they would never get to that flicker in time. Said to be good, too … The Blue Light.

Damn and blast. And this was its last night. ) Perhaps, David was deciding, I am just a two-room-and-kitchen chap.

Yet, that was not quite accurate, he reminded himself, as the scout removed his untouched jelly: he had expensive tastes he would like to be able to afford. Perhaps it was just Penny. Even one room and Penny would be the answer to everything. He felt that his happiness was so transparent at this moment that he looked sharply at the two men beside him.

“Any objection, David?” Halsey asked, noticing the look.

“None at all.” He looked at the other men with a sudden feeling of pity, for not being so madly happy as he was at this moment. With a feeling, too, of relief that they couldn’t guess his emotions. And then he wondered how many of these un revealing faces hid feelings that would have startled the whole room. They talked about everything except what they really felt.

“Of course,” he said to McLllwain.

“Let’s have the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, by all means.” He looked round the long monks’ table once more, listening to the interweaving voices, the pattern of laugh, the flow of words adding to a theme or branching from it to give it a new statement or a twist of variation.

“Rather appropriate actually,” David said.

McLllwain and Halsey showed a mild surprise, but they did not ask for an explanation. That was one of the best things about Oxford: no one ever need bother to explain.

Chapter Twenty-three.

DAVID AND HIS FATHER.

On Sunday David travelled to London. It was the beginning of March.

The whole countryside had been washed by February rains, brushed by brisk winds as if nature had determined to have a thorough spring-cleaning. He ignored the newspaper beside him: it would be filled with further attempts to interpret and cover up the bad news which had trickled out of Germany all last week. News became twice as depressing when every one was making such a determined effort to hope for the best. That underlined the danger: one did not have to explain away good news. Hell, David thought, I refuse to be depressed to-day.

To-day’s my holiday from work and worry and what should be done and what shouldn’t be done and what does this mean and what doesn’t it mean? To-day’s the day I enjoy myself. In three hours’ time I’ll be seeing Penny.

He slipped the small volume of Religio Medici back into his pocket.

He had thought the rich flow of Brown’s elaborate eloquence would be an antidote to the lists of facts and figures, the coldly presented ideas, which he had been concentrating on all last week. A diet of unimaginative prose always depressed him. He had brought the book with him as a matter of habit.

Probably he had never meant to read it, anyway. How strange we are, he thought: we buy newspapers, out of habit, which we don’t even open, and we cart along a book with us and then ignore it; as if it took a little time for us to persuade ourselves to be completely lazy.

It was pleasant to see the green fields go wheeling past, to watch the white clouds scattering over the cold blue sky in the March wind, to see some occasional patch of wild daffodils at the edge of a sheltered wood, to catch the colour of primroses under the hawthorn hedges with their sprinkling of pale green. There were small lambs, too, frisking unsteadily, to bring a smile to one’s face. The telephone wires, strung above the railway banks, moved as the train moved, dipped, straightened, rose, dipped, to mark each mile nearer to London.

He went over the calculations he had made last night. Finals were in June, and the thought of them was not unpleasant: a strange realization. Last year one had thought of Finals and felt a mixture of worry and dislike for June of 1933. Now he wished that June came in April. For after the Finals came the job with Fairbairn. If he got a cracking First, of course. Three hundred a year minimum—say, three hundred and fifty a year with pot-boiling articles.

Four hundred a year with luck and some work. Four hundred, then.

Thirty-three pounds, roughly, each month. He could live on almost a third of that. He could save about twenty pounds a month. He’d have to. June, July, August. Sixty pounds. Could you furnish two rooms with that? He damned well would. He did not want a rented flat, furnished. A place of our own, he thought. No more lodgings, or college rooms, or a Cory’s Walk where his sister Margaret appropriated his room for her awful female friends.

A place of their own … that had the right sound. Sixty pounds was not exactly a fortune, but at least they could make a beginning with the essentials. Four walls to enclose your own corner of happiness.

Four walls with a bed inside them, a table, for meals and for work, something to cook with, something to eat with, a bookcase for their books, a place to keep their clothes, a couple of chairs, a place of their own where a door shut meant a door shut. No more regulations cutting short the time that Penny and he could spend together. No more damned interference from anyone.

He laughed suddenly. Marriage, as he was picturing it, sounded like freedom.

Perhaps that was the way you should think of it: if it weren’t freedom to be with each other, if being with each other wasn’t the most important thing in your lives, then you shouldn’t even think of marriage. For a moment he imagined what witticism Marain or some of the other men he knew would think up if they heard him talk like this. He smiled. He wasn’t thinking of amusing remarks, either. He was thinking that he had found a very simple truth, and that many a very clever man had never found it; for you couldn’t track down truth with words, or analyse it, or explain it. It was there, you felt it, and you accepted it. It was as simple as that.

At Paddington he jumped off the train before it came to a halt at the long platform. A porter shook his head resignedly.

“That’s wot we’re ‘ere for,” he said to his mate, ‘to pick up the blooming pieces.”

But David was already halfway down the platform, heading towards the nearest telephone booth.

“Darling,” he said.

Penny laughed as she always did. She sounded surprised and yet not so surprised, happy, excited, gay. As soon as he heard her voice he relaxed.

He never could get rid of that fear that some day he would ‘phone and then he would stand and listen to the maid at Baker House, her voice growing fainter as she called, “Telephone for Miss. Lorrimer. Telephone …” And then, after a long pause, the voice at the end of the ‘phone would say, “Hello,” but it wouldn’t be Penny’s.

And instead of saying “Darling’ he would listen to the explanation that Miss. Lorrimer was out and had left no message. That was the fear that always struck him as he waited.

He couldn’t know that she had been lounging beside the telephone in Baker House for the last ten minutes, pretending to be most interested in the notice-board, wondering if the train was going to be late to-day, hoping it would be early. (It had been exactly on time, as it always was.) ” I’ll meet you in another hour and a half,” David said.” I’m on my way now to see Father. Lunch at the usual place?”

“At the Brasserie? But that means you will have to come all the way into town again … David, why don’t I meet you at Hammersmith? At the main entrance to the Piccadilly line? That would save a lot of time, wouldn’t it? And you won’t have to rush away from your father.

Really, David, I shall’t get lost. I’ll wear a red carnation so you will know me.” And my new spring suit: how will he like it?

There was a short pause as David considered this only sensible suggestion.

Then he said, “I love you, darling.” And he meant it.

“David!”

“It’s all right, darling. The girl at the Exchange wouldn’t dream of listening in. Would you. Exchange?”

A man’s deep voice said, “I’m being completely ladylike.”

There was a moment’s silence, and then Penny’s laughter.

“In that case,” David went on, “I repeat I love you, and send a hundred kisses, planted generously. I’ll add another hundred when I see you. What about Hampton Court for that?

That’s a good place for talking, too. I’ve been deciding a lot of things. I hope you’ll like them. Keep thinking of September.”

“September?”

“Yes, a wonderful month. Best month in the year. Goodbye, darling. See you in one hour and twenty-eight minutes. At Hammersmith, Piccadilly side. Take care of yourself. Goodbye, darling.”

He came out of the bright red booth, and stood for a moment watching the crowd, a mass of hurrying people in Sunday clothes struggling towards the trains and a day in the country. He felt the movement and stir around him, but he saw and heard nothing. It was ridiculous, he thought, that anyone could be as happy as this at this moment. But he was.

David’s father was alone in the house. He was sitting in his wheel-chair at the window, but he had been reading the Observer’s editorial so attentively that he had not seen David coming along Cory’s Walk.

David’s quick glance noticed the un tidied room, the sandwiches wrapped in a napkin on a plate, and the Thermos of tea placed beside them on the small table. He greeted his father affectionately.

“Where’s Meg?” he asked.

“At Communion. Then she is lunching with Miss. Rawson, and they are going to some choral society’s concert. The Messiah, I believe. She will be home by five o’clock.” “I see,” David said quietly, but he looked worriedly at his father.

“Well, how have you been?” He had to admit that his father seemed stronger to-day than he had appeared for several months now. There was an alert, almost vigorous look on his face.

“Well enough.” Mr. Bosworth held up the newspaper, “There’s been enough happening since last Monday to excite a man. What do you think of it all now, David?”

David glanced at the sedate headlines to the restrainec columns, tucked away into the middle of the paper as if to lessen their importance.

“Disturbing,” he said lamely.

“Don’) get too excited.

Father,” he added gently.

“If we were Germans we could do something about it. But as it is–-” He placed a hand on his father’s shoulder. He was minimizing his own feelings to calm his father.

His father looked at him, and then smiled sadly.

“I know,” he said, ‘you have your own worries, and plenty of them. You don’t like the news, either, but you are glad to forget it. Anc it is, fundamentally, the Germans’ problem. But they won’t face it, for in their hearts they believe that Germany is nevel at fault. So they will look round tor others on whom to blame this Reichstag fire, and persuade themselves that what ever they do—or allow to be done, and that’s the next stagf to actual doing—is right. And the trouble will grow.” Hi; voice suddenly sharpened.

“Don’t people ever read his ton properly? Or do they think that if they know a list of date; and what king ruled when, then that is enough? All this has happened before, when Napoleon started his career. Step b^j step—it is all there for us to read in the history books.” Thei his vice softened again.